ABSTRACT:I argue
that the modernist notion of a human self (or subject) cannot easily be
post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified
narrative with a beginning and an end (death) is a condition for asking
humanly important questions about its meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). Such questions
are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense
of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy,
ought to be taken seriously in reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism
has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or
structure the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism
is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive
frameworkspremodern, modern, postmodernand the need to evaluate those
frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness
whatsoever (say, astrology) to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most
important challenge for the pragmatist.

1. The idea that "grand metanarratives" are dead is usually regarded as the
key to the cultural phenomenon known as postmodernism. We have been taught to think that
the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality, knowledge, truth, objectivity, and self
have become too old-fashioned to be taken seriously any longer. There is no privileged
"God's-Eye-View" available for telling big, important stories about these
notions. The cultural hegemony of science and systematic philosophy, in particular, is
over.

Nevertheless, as even some postmodern thinkers themselves keep on insisting, we still
have to be committed to the grand narrative of our individual life.(1)
We cannot really dispense with the modernist notion of self, and the one who says we can
forgets who she or he is. From the point of view of our own life, no postmodern
death of the subject can take place. On the contrary, my death transcends my life; it is
not an experienceable event of my lifeas Wittgenstein also
famously pointed out at Tractatus 6.4311. Most (perhaps all) of us feel that one's
own death is hardly even conceivable from within one's life.

On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, death must be postulated as the imaginary
end point, the final event, of the story of my life. If there were no death (i.e., the
annihilation of my self) to be expected, I could not even realize that I am leading a
specific, spatio-temporally restricted human life. The fact that death is awaiting for me,
even if I cannot fully understand what it is all about, enables me to think about my life
as a coherent whole with a beginning and an end. Only with respect to such a life can the
question of "meaning" or "significance" arise.

It seems, then, that no postmodernist talk about the disappearance of the subject,
connected with the distrust felt toward grand narratives, can force us to give up this
meta-level fact about our life. We might perhaps even say, echoing Kant, that the
inescapability of death is a necessary "transcendental condition" of a
meaningful (or, for that matter, meaningless) life. Human life as we know it is
intelligible only under the circumstances in which death inevitably puts an end to it.
Without death, our lives would be something entirely different, something about which we
can have no clear conception whatsoevernot from the point of
view of our present human condition, at least.

Death, then, plays a decisive role in the modern human being's understanding of her or
his life as a unified narrative. Let us explore the essentially modern notion of
narrativity in some more detail. It is a central element of the modern outlook, of our
typically modern conception of personal identity, to employ this notion in making sense of
our lives. The modern person, often without noticing it, conceives of her or his life as a
"story", and this narrativist attitude to life has been conceptualized in
various ways in the history of modern thought (cf. Taylor 1989). To see one's life as a
linear progression from a starting point, through various phases (corresponding to
adventures in a novel), up to its final page, death, is to be a modern person. To go
postmodern is to break this chain of narration, as in self-conscious fiction, in which the
story itself somehow "knows", and shows that it knows, that it is only a
fictional story. The postmodern person could, or such a person thinks that she or he
could, understand that the subjective life she or he leads is not really the life of a
single, unified subject. Then, apparently, such a "subject" would not be a
person in any normal sense of the term.

I am not simply suggesting that we should not at all attempt to go postmodern in this
sense. The "antihumanist" French (as well as American) thinkers have had many
insightful things to say about the ways in which the modern subject is constituted in
terms of the social and political structures (e.g., power relations) which make
life-narratives possible in the first placeinstead of being
the fully autonomous center of its life we are (modernistically) inclined to think it is.
Furthermore, interesting post-structuralist developments of these investigations have been
pursued. Some are still emerging. Yet, from the point of view of an individual human being
living in her or his natural and cultural environment, there can be no total disappearance
of the subject any more than there can be a total disappearance of all acting characters
in a literary narrative. Narratives are about actionsusually
about human actions in some problematic circumstances. There simply is no way for us
humans to remove this fact of humanity. To do so would require that we turn into beings
quite different from what we in fact are. As long as our life is intelligible to us, we
will presumably be unable to fail to see ourselves as characters in a narrative, acting in
the midst of the problems our environment throws against our face. Even the postmodernist
writers themselves, whose work I am unable to comment upon here in any detail, must view
themselves as subjects engaging in the intentional action of writing postmodernist prose.

It is, in fact, somewhat ironical that postmodernist philosophers and sociologists of
sciencefor example, Joseph Rouse (1996) in his recent bookstrongly emphasize the need to take seriously the narrative aspect
of science, thus employing an inherently modernist notion in apologizing for
postmodernism. "Modernist" philosophers of science need not necessarily oppose
the idea that science, like any other human practice, is partly constituted through the
narratives told in and about it.(2) On the contrary, they
may join the postmodernist thinkers in granting narrativity an important place in the
formation of scientific world-views.

2. I would now like to suggest that, despite the thoroughgoing modernity (or
postmodernity) of our age, we should not only take into account the modern and postmodern
literary analogues of human life (i.e., linear narrative and broken,
"self-conscious" narrative), but also be prepared to look at our lives, at least
occasionally, in premodern terms, e.g., in terms of classical tragedy. Our
serious mistakes in life will, we might come to think, be "revenged"perhaps not by any supernatural forces, but by other human beings or
by the non-human nature nevertheless. Or at least so we can interpret those mistakes. We
might, for example, conceive of a disastrous car accident or plane crash as analogous to
the nemesis the tragic hero confronts after having committed the tragic mistake.
Many people would undoubtedly consider this an irrational idea. The people who die in such
accidentslet alone those millions who die in wars and
massacres are usually innocent. They never did anything that
ought to be revenged: they made no tragic mistakes; they just died, unnecessarily.

But this is not the point. The tragic figuressay, Oedipus
or Hamletwere, in some sense, innocent, too. Perhaps the most
tragic thing that can happen to a human person is that even an innocent life may be
"revenged". Even if, in some conventional sense, the character has been innocent
or even virtuous, there may still be something fundamentally "wrong" in her or
his life, or in the very fact that she or he lives at all. In our (post)modern economic
societies, we may quite easily think about our lives as crimes against humanity. It is
because we live in the way we do that the non-human nature and all the poor people in the
third world suffer incredibly. We cannot help contributing to the increasing of that
suffering, even though we live as responsibly as we can within our standard Western
liberal democracies. We deserve a nemesis.(3)

I do not think that any authentic feeling apparently captured in (quasi-)religious
exclamations like "I am guilty" or "I have sinned" can be easily
reached in concrete human life. But the Christian experience of sin, or moral condemnation
in front of God, is perhaps the closest analogue to the experience I try to describe (an
experience that we, rich Western people as we are, ought to be capable of having),
except that the world-view of tragedy recognizes no Christian salvation. Therefore,
tragedy is conceptually closer to us non-believers.

What I try to say is that the points of view to the world provided by fundamental
physics, molecular biology, and neurophysiology are not the only legitimate ones to be
taken into account when we try to understand our humanity. We should open our eyes to
what, say, tragedy (among many, perhaps conflicting perspectives) can tell us about our
lives. In the pluralistic spirit of pragmatism, we should tolerate various
different points of view language-games employing different
standards of acceptability, pursuing different goals, and satisfying different human needs for interpretively structuring the world, including our own place
in its scheme of things (see Pihlström 1996a). Modern science is, of course, one of these
human perspectives to reality, but the premodern tragic picture of man's fragile position
in the world cannot be excluded just because there is no "scientific evidence"
for its correctness. It is a correct picture in an entirely different sense, based on
entirely different practical purposes. Pragmatists, early and late, have respected this
plurality of our ways of experiencing and making sense of both human and non-human
reality. They have had no use for the fiction of a "God's-Eye-View" to the world
(here the traditions of pragmatism and postmodernism of course resemble each other), but,
unlike postmodernists, they have not attempted to destroy the notion of a human subject.
Instead, they have respected our need to ask questions about the significance of our
individual lives. Therefore, pragmatism might also be able to accommodate our need a very human need indeed to be able to
conceive of our lives as tragic (or, to point out a possible link between the premodern
and modern standpoints, as tragic narratives).

Relevant examples could be multiplied. Another crucially important premodern source of
insight for those who wish to make sense of their human limitedness might be the Book of
Job (which is not a tragedy, of course). Reading the story about Job may make us
appreciate our smallness and insignificance as parts of a vast amoral universe (cf. Wilcox
1989) irrespective of whether we are theists, atheists, or
agnostics, I would add.

The problem here, as so often in philosophy, is how to avoid uncritical relativism.
Why can (or should) we "structure" our lives on the basis of tragedy,
recognizing our hubris and the resulting nemesis, or on the basis of the
Book of Job, recognizing our ignorance and weakness against the great mysteries of the
creation, but not at least not rationally and responsibly on the basis of astrology (another premodern practice or
viewpoint), postulating interstellar causal forces which determine the events of our
lives? Both tragedy, the Bible, and astrology are, to use Nelson Goodman's term,
"entrenched" in human culture. There has to be a normative point of view
from which we can say that two of them should be taken seriously (though critically) in
reflecting on human life whereas the third one should not. There has to be a way of
saying that the human purposes which tragedy and the Scriptures (non-foundationalistically
interpreted) serve are more serious and better purposes than the ones served by astrology
(or other irrational pseudo-sciences).(4) It is hardly
surprising that one of the constantly reoccuring charges that pragmatists have had to meet
with is the accusation that pragmatism amounts to relativism.

The ultimate form of philosophical relativism is the first-person subjectivist view,
according to which I am myself the only possible standard for the rationality (or moral
acceptability, or any other normative virtue) of my beliefs, actions, etc. This is no
doubt a possible position. It is related to still another example
admittedly, a modern rather than premodern one which might
throw light on the philosophical relevance of certain non-scientific, prima facie
non-rational frameworks: the search for authentic existence, or authenticity for
short, as constitutive of our individual lives. This search, inseparably connected with
the inevitability of death and the above-mentioned experience of guilt, has been
extensively discussed in the existentialist tradition, i.e., in the work of such
literary and philosophical figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus
(see Golomb 1995).

If it is true that we ourselves "create our authenticity" and that
"[t]here is no one but ourselves to condemn or appreciate our behaviour" in the
course of that creation (ibid., p. 25), there is a danger of solipsism that
we must not fail to observe. If I am the measure of how my life
its authenticity, moral quality, or anything else about it
should be evaluated, then I am, in a profound sense, alone in the world. The world is my
world.(5) Again, it is quite possible to hold this view. One
cannot really argue against solipsism on theoretical grounds. Instead, the
"argument" can only be based on an ethical decision to lead a certain kind of
(authentic) life, to expose one's individual opinions to public normative criteria.

3. There is, then, no easy argumentative "solution" to the problem of
relativism, subjectivism, and solipsism. This problem must be constantly faced when
dealing with philosophical-anthropological issues such as the meaning (or lack thereof) of
human life.

My main proposal here is that the tradition of pragmatism might be able to accommodate
our need for a normative reflection on the relevant standpoints from which our life can be
structured in a premodern, modern, or postmodern way better than most other philosophical or metaphilosophical
frameworks. Pragmatism, at least in the form inherited from William James and John Dewey,
can be a reasonable reaction to "the tragic sense of life".(6)
Giving up all kinds of foundations, whether philosophical, religious, or scientific, it
may help us live with our utter fragility and metaphysical insecurity, with our lack of
absolute guarantees of happiness or moral order a theme
emphasized in what we might more generally call the anti-foundationalist tradition
in philosophy, all the way from the Book of Job through the classical pragmatists up to
authenticity-seeking existentialism, the Wittgensteinian conception of certainty (see
Wittgenstein 1969), and the thought of such neopragmatists as W.V. Quine, Richard Rorty,
and Hilary Putnam.(7)

Pragmatism may turn out to be a useful philosophical framework for the search of a
middle ground between optimistic religious and metaphysical reactions to the problem of
life, on the one hand, and nihilistic pessimism, on the other. It can, moreover, offer us
a normative perspective to what sort of language-games and practices should be included in
our serious, reflective paideia to how we should
further develop our insecure and non-foundational predicament. The pragmatist insists not
only that our practices themselves determine the normative criteria of their success but
also that they can fail to meet those criteria. Since the search for meaningfulness in
human life is itself a practice, its success must also be normatively evaluated.

The role of philosophy in the "education of mankind" may, thus, be
considerable, even though it may demand a lot of hard work of individual philosophers for
this role to be actually played. Why, after all, should avoiding non-normative relativism
be an easy task? Why shouldn't we think about the threat of relativism as a positive
challenge for us pragmatists to be as critical and reflective, though simultaneously as
pluralistic and tolerant, as we can?

The educational role of philosophy is, of course, essentially modern. It is from the
normatively loaded point of view of modernity that we can, and must, evaluate the
premodern and postmodern (and, for that matter, modern) viewpoints we employ in making
sense of our lives. In this sense (but not in any more fundamental sense),
modernity is still in a privileged, or at least distinguished, position among the various
frameworks we share and go on to develop. Pragmatism offers us no way to escape this
morally concerned predicament, but it may help us open our eyes to both premodern and
postmodern ways of educating ourselves and our modernity.

Notes

(1) One of the thinkers I have in mind here is the Finnish philosopher Esa
Saarinen, the co-author of the recent postmodern "anti-book" on "media
philosohy", Imagologies (Taylor & Saarinen 1994).

(2) For a review of Rouse's work, seeking to show that his postmodernism
does not escape the "modernist" issue of realism in the philosophy of science,
see Pihlström (1996c). It should be noted that what Rouse defends is a
"pro-science" version of postmodernism not to be
confused with the more popular "anti-science" or science-abusing kind of
postmodernism ridiculed by the physicist Alan Sokal in his well-known academic joke in
1996.

(3) In his Swedish and Finnish essays discussing the environmental crisis,
G.H. von Wright has used the term nemesis naturalis.

(4) Some religious doctrines, such as creationism, are of course pseudo-sciences
themselves.

(5) For a critical discussion of solipsism from the viewpoint of
pragmatism and the realism debate, see Pihlström (1996b). In his book on authenticity,
Golomb also wishes to avoid the solipsistic interpretation of the search he deals with.

(6) Cf. Hook (1974). The term is originally de Unamuno's.

(7) Pihlström (1996a) contains a detailed assessment of the work
of these key figures of contemporary pragmatism as well as of their relations to the
classical pragmatists.

References

Golomb, Jacob (1995) In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus,
Routledge, London & New York.